Last week, the Indiana Senate passed a bill targeting diversity, equity and inclusion across state government, including in K-12 and higher education. Senate Bill 289 would ban DEI consultants, internal DEI audits and any offices or workers whose “primary duties” include providing noncredit DEI programs at public colleges and universities. The state attorney general could ask courts to fine institutions up to $250,000 per violation.

The state Senate Democrats—outnumbered four to one by their Republican counterparts in Indianapolis—gave speech after speech Thursday against the legislation. Senator Shelli Yoder, the minority caucus leader, said the bill was about “silencing essential truths and reinstating discrimination under the false pretense of neutrality, or words like ‘merit.’”

But Dr. Tyler Johnson, a Republican senator and one of the bill’s authors, said SB 289 would actually combat discrimination. He said he was inspired to take action more than two years ago, after a student he mentored felt discriminated against in medical school admissions at an Indiana university that Johnson declined to name. “Our goal here is to remove divisive and discriminatory top-down manipulative ideology,” Johnson said. “You can’t fix discrimination with discrimination.”

As the vote on the measure loomed, Democrats suddenly moved to oust the Senate president—Indiana lieutenant governor Micah Beckwith—as chair of the session for a post on X celebrating the bill’s passage before it actually passed. “HOOSIER REVOLUTION: Indiana Just TORPEDOED Woke Indoctrination!” the post began. “The Indiana Senate just dropped the hammer on the radical DEI racket with SB 289—and the left is LOSING IT. No more taxpayer-funded race hustling.”

The Democrats’ ouster attempt failed and the bill passed 34 to 13; it still has to pass the Indiana House and be signed by the governor to become law.

PEN America, a free speech and academic freedom advocacy group, has raised concern about SB 289, including a provision that it says “broadly prohibits faculty and staff from ‘promoting, embracing or endorsing stereotypes,’ using language so vague it could severely restrict classroom instruction and discussion.”

The bill is just one example—though perhaps the closest to passage so far—of renewed efforts by Republican lawmakers in multiple states to enact legislation to diminish DEI. Donald Trump began his second term as president with executive orders and funding freezes targeting DEI, but these federal actions have met resistance in the courts. Now some states are taking up the fight, joining Florida, Texas and other states that, even before Trump retook office, already broadly banned DEI from public institutions. Some states are further proposing bills targeting things that Trump hasn’t directly gone after, including faculty tenure.

Amy Reid, senior manager of the Freedom to Learn program at PEN America and former chair of the faculty at New College of Florida—which has been reshaped by the Florida governor’s conservative board appointees—listed multiple concerning bills in a few states.

“What we’re seeing is less a response to changes in Washington than an acceleration of the movement to censor higher education at the state level,” Reid told Inside Higher Ed. “The slew of recently introduced bills in Iowa, Indiana and Ohio have broad and dire implications for free speech on college and university campuses.”

Here is some introduced or planned state legislation to watch:

Ohio

In 2023 and last year, Buckeye State faculty, students and administrators pushed back against Senate Bill 83, a wide-ranging piece of public higher education legislation designed to ban mandatory DEI programs, weaken tenure protections and—at least in some of its multiple amended versions—outlaw faculty strikes.

At an over-seven-hour-long state Senate hearing in April 2023, more than 100 people spoke out against SB 83, and hundreds more had signed up to speak. The Senate passed a version of the bill the next month, but the House sat on it and the legislation died.

In the current legislative session, however, Republican senator and Higher Education Committee vice chair Jerry Cirino has filed similar legislation as Senate Bill 1. And Ohio has a new House leader who might support SB 1’s passage: former senator Matt Huffman, who voted for SB 83.

Olivia Wile, press secretary for Ohio’s House majority caucus, didn’t say whether Huffman supports SB 1, but noted, “Higher education reform is an important issue for this General Assembly. We’ll take a look at [the bill] when it reaches the House.”

The 75-page SB 1 would, among other things, ban affirmative action in hiring as well as DEI “offices” and “departments” (the legislation doesn’t define the terms), scholarships that use DEI “in any manner,” and DEI trainings and orientations. Cirino told Inside Higher Ed that the new bill goes further in dismantling DEI than SB 83 would have.

“It’s institutionalized discrimination and [is] consuming an awful lot of money and time and effort in our universities,” Cirino said. “So an all-out ban on DEI programs and expenditures is in the bill now.”

He wants students to have equal opportunity, he said. He noted the prevalence of racism in the 1950s and ’60s, then said, “I think, prior to DEI, we were doing very well on our way to correcting a lot of those bad practices. But, again, you cannot solve a past discrimination by discriminating now against another group to make up for it.”

SB 1 supports one kind of diversity: “intellectual diversity,” which it defines as “multiple, divergent and varied perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.” (A Republican-backed Indiana law passed last year also used this term.) SB 1 would require institutions to “ensure the fullest degree of intellectual diversity,” including in curriculum, general education requirements, student course evaluations, annual reviews and student learning outcomes.

The legislation would also ban faculty strikes and require post-tenure review, plus allow for “an immediate and for cause post-tenure review at any time for a faculty member who has a documented and sustained record of significant underperformance outside” their annual performance evaluation. It would also prevent unions from collectively bargaining over post-tenure review and layoff policies.

While Cirino said SB 1 isn’t a “challenge to tenure at all,” multiple Ohio faculty union leaders have publicly disagreed. In a joint letter, they wrote that SB 1 “would imperil the retention and recruitment of excellent faculty by essentially eliminating meaningful tenure.”

“SB 1 is a slightly revised version of SB 83 from the last General Assembly that remains an example of blatant government overreach and micromanagement of the university,” the unions said. “It is state-imposed censorship of what occurs in the university classroom, and will have a chilling effect on academic freedom and freedom of expression.”

SB 1 has yet to pass the Senate or House.

Iowa

Iowa Republicans already banned DEI offices at public colleges and universities last year and prohibited institutions from hiring or assigning anyone “to perform duties” of a DEI office. But they may go further this year.

In November, Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley created a Higher Education Committee, whose chairman, Taylor Collins, has promised a “comprehensive review” of colleges and universities.

Among Collins’s proposed bills this legislative session is House Study Bill 63, which would require that general education requirements “do not distort significant historical events or include any curriculum or other material that teaches identity politics or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent” in U.S. or Iowan institutions.

Collins has also proposed House Study Bill 53, under which public colleges and universities couldn’t “require or constrain students to enroll” in DEI or CRT-related courses for “any academic degree program”—unless the program title “clearly establishes its course of study as primarily focused on racial, ethnic or gender studies.” That bill would also ban institutions from requiring, soliciting or incentivizing faculty to apply or participate in DEI or CRT “practices” or include DEI- and CRT- “related content in any course.”

Collins didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment. The bills have yet to pass either legislative chamber.

The Iowa committee was visited last month by a policy analyst for the Manhattan Institute—the conservative think tank home to anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo. The analyst criticized “activist-bent courses” and said, “Public universities in Iowa are no exception to pushing students into accepting progressive views and ideas as unquestionable truth,” according to a testimony transcript the think tank posted online. (Indiana’s SB 289 contains language similar to the Manhattan Institute’s 2023 model legislation.)

Jesse Arm, the think tank’s executive director of external affairs and chief of staff, said that analyst was invited to testify. Asked about the organization’s involvement in particular legislation, Arm said he’s “not familiar with the specifics of each state and their given bill” and said, “The role of Manhattan Institute is really to sort of serve as an incubator of ideas.” He said, “If lawmakers take inspiration from our reports or things that come out in our affiliate magazine, City Journal, and run with them, that’s great, but we’re not an aggressive 50-state activist operation with operatives on the ground.”

North Dakota

The current version of House Bill 1437 would ban tenure for any faculty member hired after July 1, 2026, at North Dakota’s two-year institutions, which the legislation defines as Bismarck State College, Dakota College at Bottineau, Lake Region State College, North Dakota State College of Science and Williston State College.

“I don’t see any advantage to the students to have somebody who can basically hide behind a protection where they could almost never be let go,” said state representative Mike Motschenbacher, the bill’s lead sponsor.

But Motschenbacher’s original iteration of the bill doesn’t seem to be moving forward. He shared with Inside Higher Ed a proposed amended version that wouldn’t ditch tenure but would require post-tenure reviews every three years for tenured faculty at both two- and four-year public institutions. The post-tenure review committees wouldn’t be allowed to have more than two faculty on them, so they could include many nonfaculty staffers.

“I fully expect to get enough support to get it through the House chambers here,” Motschenbacher told Inside Higher Ed, adding, “It’s really hard to say” what the prospects are in the Senate.

In 2023, the North Dakota House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would have allowed the presidents of Dickinson State University and Bismarck State College to fire tenured faculty members without any review from a faculty committee. But the Senate didn’t follow suit.

Texas

It’s unclear what form legislation will take in Texas, where in 2023 Republicans passed a sweeping ban on public college and university DEI programming. But as The Texas Tribune has reported, Governor Greg Abbott has indicated he’s interested in erasing the tradition of faculty involvement in hiring.

“College professors have increasingly pushed woke agendas,” Abbott said during his last State of the State address. “They have too much influence over who is hired to educate our kids. We need legislation that prohibits professors from having any say over employment decisions.”

Abbott’s press office didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.